Chos'chosi
Chos’chosi is an augmented reality experience exploring Xhosa cultural identity through an animated 3D figure that users can place within their modern environments, creating a dialogue between traditional heritage and contemporary spaces.
Context
Traditional archives and historical collections often present cultural artifacts in disconnected, decontextualized ways that separate indigenous knowledge systems from lived experience. Xhosa histories, like many indigenous narratives, have typically been documented through colonial perspectives or presented as static, historical artifacts rather than living cultural elements. This disconnection creates barriers to meaningful engagement with cultural heritage, particularly for younger generations navigating between traditional values and contemporary realities.
The very concept of an “archive” has been shaped by Western epistemologies that privilege certain forms of knowledge preservation over others. This has resulted in cultural histories that are often fragmented, decontextualized, and removed from the communities they represent. For the Xhosa people specifically, there exists a need to reclaim narrative authority and reimagine how their cultural knowledge, language, and identities can be preserved and transmitted in ways that respect indigenous knowledge systems while embracing technological possibilities.
In modern South African spaces, there remains a tension between contemporary urban environments and traditional cultural expressions. These spaces often reflect colonial and post-colonial design sensibilities that may not naturally accommodate or validate indigenous ways of knowing and being. This spatial politics creates what the creators describe as “hard-pressed modern ideals that would normally not host Xhosa thinking and sensibilities,” highlighting the need for interventions that challenge these exclusionary dynamics.
Approach
Sihle Sogaula and Siviwe James approached this challenge by reimagining what a cultural archive could be through immersive digital technology. Rather than creating a traditional collection of static artifacts, they developed Chos’chosi as an interactive augmented reality experience in collaboration with Sisanda Tech.
The team created a detailed 3D animated model representing a seated figure that embodies themes of “fashioning, mending, and the making of Xhosa histories.” This representation moves beyond simple visual documentation to create a dynamic embodiment of cultural knowledge and practice. The figure serves as both a cultural signifier and a technological intervention, bridging traditional narrative forms with contemporary digital expression.
The experience was deliberately designed to be participatory, encouraging users to place the 3D animated figure within their own physical environments through augmented reality. This approach transforms passive consumption of cultural information into active engagement, allowing users to create personal connections between their lived spaces and Xhosa cultural elements. By bringing these elements into domestic, work, and public spaces not typically associated with indigenous African cultures, the project challenges spatial hierarchies and cultural segregation.
The social sharing component further extends this approach by creating what the creators call a “visual dialogue” where users document and share their interactions with the AR figure. This establishes a distributed, community-generated archive of experiences that captures how different individuals relate to and situate Xhosa cultural elements within contemporary contexts.
Output
Chos’chosi has successfully produced an independent augmented reality application that houses the animated 3D figure exploring Xhosa identity, belonging, land, and language. The application enables users to position this cultural representation within their personal environments, creating intentional juxtapositions between traditional Xhosa elements and contemporary settings.
This digital intervention serves as the entry point to Inxili, a more comprehensive cultural archive being developed by the creators. As an introductory component, Chos’chosi establishes a new paradigm for engaging with cultural heritage—one that is interactive, spatially relevant, and community-driven rather than institutionally contained.
Through the encouraged practice of sharing videos of these AR interactions on social media, the project has created a growing collection of user-generated content that documents how diverse individuals relate to and integrate Xhosa cultural elements into their daily environments. This distributed archive of experiences expands the project beyond the app itself, creating a broader visual conversation about cultural presence and belonging in modern spaces.
By allowing users to place Xhosa cultural elements in environments that historically might have excluded such perspectives, Chos’chosi actively challenges spatial and temporal boundaries that have traditionally limited where and how indigenous knowledge systems can exist. The result is not just a digital representation of culture but a dynamic intervention that questions established hierarchies of knowledge, space, and cultural expression while inviting broader participation in the preservation and evolution of Xhosa heritage.
Credit
Developer
Sisanda Tech
Artists
Siviwe James
Sihle Sogaula
Funder/Sponsor
TWYG
Electric South
Technology
Meta Spark AR
Blender